'The Supremacy of Japanese Cars Has Been 40-Plus Years In the Making' (bloomberg.com)

American business journalist Joe Nocera writes in a Bloomberg article about "how badly things have deteriorated for the U.S. car makers," after the recent news that both General Motors and Ford will soon be exiting the sedan market in the country. Slashdot reader gollum123 shares the report: Much of the analysis about Ford and GM's exit from the sedan market stressed that sedan sales have lost ground in recent years "as consumers have gravitated toward pickup trucks and sport-utility vehicles," as the New York Times put it. If you look at the historical sales figures of the top Japanese sedans, you'll see a small decline in recent years, but nothing like the big drop-off in sales that have hammered the American companies. So in addition to the overall decline in sedan sales, there is a second, largely overlooked, dynamic taking place: Americans have only stopped buying American sedans, not Japanese sedans. The American car companies now say they are going to count on profits from trucks and SUVs while moving toward autonomous and all-electric vehicles. They had better hope that transition takes place quickly.

I couldn't help noticing that while the top three selling vehicles in the U.S. are, indeed, American-made trucks, No. 4 on the list is Nissan's top SUV, the Rogue, the sales of which have gone from 18,000 in 2007 to 403,000 last year. No. 5 is a Toyota SUV, the Rav4 (407,000 in 2017). No. 6 is the Honda CR-V (378,000). And the leading American SUV? It's the Chevy Equinox. Last year, Chevrolet sold 290,000 of them -- 100,000 fewer than the Toyota Camry.

Comments

Re: duh

[Type44Q]

Honda was awesome, up until recently. When they knowingly installed defective transmissions in hundreds of thousands of Accords and Odysseys, and then lied about it for years, they demonstrated to the world that we're obviously past peak Honda.

Re:duh

[HornWumpus]

Make sure you buy a Nissan with a CVT. You deserve it.

IQ of factory workers

[Newton IV]

Despite the effort of the ideologues of the 60s, the IQ of the typical American factory workers is below the IQ of Japanese assembly workers. These ideologues would rather ruin the economy than prove themselves wrong. This is what we are observing currently.

Re:the 70's and beyond were horrible for american

[DNS-and-BIND]

It was a one-way street. Japanese could sell their cars in America, but Americans were blocked - by tariffs - from selling in Japan. How could there have been any other outcome? It was unfair from the beginning.

Tariffs - great for every other country but America, but God forbid if we want to protect our workers by raising the cost of foreign goods. It's just bizarre how these tariffs work spectacularly well for Japan, Germany, China, Canada, etc.

Import tariffs are necessary to protect US quality of life. Our minimum wage and other worker protections make us fundamentally noncompetitive with countries that can exploit slave labor (or something close). Without trade protections, either our workers have to work for peanuts, or our economy will eventually tank. Import tariffs (and the related topic of export subsidies) generally protect our comparatively strong social policy.

Now riddle me this: If global warming is such an existential threat that we need need to get as much clean energy online as quickly as possible, why did the Obama administration put steep tariffs on Chinese solar panels?

Demographics

[shaksys]

Interesting what a low crime rate and a high graduation rate caused by a strong nuclear family can do for a nation.